Progressive Labor Party on Race & Racism

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class. We organize workers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.

Only the dictatorship of the working class — communism — can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today’s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.

Worldwide capitalism, in its relentless drive for profit, inevitably leads to war, fascism, poverty, disease, starvation and environmental destruction. The capitalist class, through its state power — governments, armies, police, schools and culture — maintains a dictatorship over the world’s workers. The capitalist dictatorship supports, and is supported by, the anti-working-class ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, individualism and religion.

While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim “communism is dead,” capitalism is the real failure for billions worldwide. Capitalism returned to Russia and China because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system, like wages and privileges. Russia and China did not establish communism.

Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. Everyone will share in society’s benefits and burdens.

Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian and indigenous workers, and to divide the entire working class.

Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women — sexism — and divisive gender roles created by the class society.

Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one Party.

Communism means that the minds of millions of workers must become free from religion’s false promises, unscientific thinking and poisonous ideology. Communism will triumph when the masses of workers can use the science of dialectical materialism to understand, analyze and change the world to meet their needs and aspirations.

Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers — eventually everyone — must become communist organizers. Join Us!

Dump electoral politics and support the fight for communism by purchasing this graphic hoodie. click the image to donate.The capitalist class around the world is sliding towards wider war and the various national bosses are moving towards more fascism amid growing volatility. This is the true nature of capitalism. Liberal democracy is a mask that the bosses remove when it is “inconvenient”. They then use their state apparatus, the politicians, media, police and military to increasingly rule with the iron fist of fascism creating further chaos as bosses fight each other and attack the working classThis election has seen an unprecedented effort by the ruling class to use the state to elect Hillary Clinton. The building up of the openly racist and sexist Nazi Trump by the liberal press in the primaries was meant to get an opponent that would scare the working class towards Clinton. “In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the candidates, but make them [Cruz, Trump and Carson] more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream Republican Party. We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.” (email from Clinton campaign to DNC, dated 4/7/2015. Reprinted in Counterpunch, 10/11/2016)Trump became the Republican candidate the main wing ruling class ultimately settled on out of fear that Clinton could lose to Cruz and thus strengthen the relatively smaller Koch-led “Tea Party” bosses.Black, Women Workers refused WarOne main reason the rulers want Clinton is to win Black and women workers to fight the bosses wars. The last 15 years of a two front war in the Middle East exposed the limits of the U.S. military. As combat ramped up the military was unable to recruit enough soldiers. A key factor was that the numbers of Black and women workers in the military dropped drastically:“reflecting a lack of support among African Americans for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan….Since fiscal 2000, when African Americans made up 23.5 percent of Army recruits, their numbers have fallen steadily to less than 14 percent in [2005]… A similar trend has reduced the number of female Army recruits from 22 percent in 2000 to about 17 percent.” (Washington Post 3/9/05)This predominantly white working class male military was soon worn down, and lost both wars. “It’s probably accurate to say that in the course of one disappointment or disaster after another from Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia to Iraq, Yemen to Pakistan, the US military never actually lost an encounter on the battlefield. But nowhere was it truly triumphant on the battlefield either, not in a way that turned out to mean anything.” (The Nation, 2/8/2016)The refusal of so many Black and women soldiers to refuse to kill workers in the Middle East points to the greatest hope for the working class. The only way to get off the spiral of capitalist war and fascism is to build a revolutionary communist movement of workers and students to smash capitalism and build a communist society led by the working class. Workers are right to be scared of the mass racism of Trump - but the seemingly lesser evil of Clinton is a suicidal path for us to follow - a path leading to even bigger imperialist wars.Clinton Leads the Way to Next WarThe next war is on the horizon. While the U.S bosses were busy slaughtering workers in the Middle East, the Chinese bosses were moving into the U.S. stronghold of Latin America, investing in Africa, and building an anti-U.S. alliance with the Philippines bosses and others. At the same time, they are building island military bases in the South China Sea, daring the U.S. to stop their military build-up.The Russian bosses have also made big gains at the expense of the U.S. bosses, becoming a military player in the Middle East. Today, the U.S. and Russian rulers are in a devastating proxy war in Syria that threatens to escalate into open confrontation. Already 400,000 people have died in that civil war, started by the Obama and then-Secretary of State, Clinton. As the capitalists from Washington to Beijing to Moscow slide towards another world war, Clinton is being charged by U.S. bosses to win the U.S. working class to this death match.Fascism Attacks Workers, Disciplines Capitalists As imperialist rivalries sharpen and the threat of war increases, imposing fascism is central to the bosses’ plan to win the working class to imperialist war. Fascism means the rulers mobilize the entire society for the war effort, bringing their own class into line as relatively smaller capitalists are sacrificed and the big ones use every means available to protect their profits. Second, it means increasing racist and sexist attacks on the working class to terrorize them into submission, all while being downplayed in the bosses’ media. The U.S. bosses are turning to the fascist state capitalism of their Chinese and Russian competitors. Compared to the U.S., the direct control by the Chinese bosses’ state over all aspects of society gives them more ability to suppress local capitalists who don’t cooperate.Headlined “China’s disappearing billionaires,” CNBC (2/1/2016) reported, “Though it has received far less attention, another more ominous sign of trouble is the “disappearance” of senior executives from at least 34 Chinese companies over the last year.” The Chinese bosses also assert more direct control over news outlets then the U.S. bosses, who are now moving towards their own version of state media. Ruling class politicians that hesitate to fall in line with the main wing of the bosses, like Paul Ryan, are hammered by the bosses’ media into submission until they do. Meanwhile, the mass flooding in Louisiana and days of antiracist rebellions in Milwaukee this summer were mostly ignored, with capitalist media attention fixated on the Olympics.Rulers Attempts at Total Control Bring Their Own ChaosFrom the U.S. to China, when capitalists attempt to assert greater control, the inner contradictions of capitalism create more volatility – and revolutionary opportunities. In spite of the U.S. rulers’ all-out efforts to anoint Clinton, millions of young people refuse to support her or any candidate. The antiracist rebellions of Black workers in Baton Rouge, Raleigh and Milwaukee against racist police terror show us the terrified and weak U.S. bosses are desperate to avoid another Ferguson or Baltimore.This desperation is both a danger and an opportunity for the working class. We should have no illusions that anything will dissuade the bosses from pursuing more fascism. The U.S. bosses allowed a passenger ship, the Lusitania, get sunk by German submarines to win U.S. workers to fight World War I, an imperialist bloodbath that ended in the world’s first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. A resurgent German ruling class burnt down their own parliament, the Reichstag, to usher in the Nazis and begin World War II—a war communists led the resistance to and ended in workers seizing power in China in 1949. Capitalists will do anything to keep power and win workers to die for it. As world war becomes more of an imminent possibility, the more they’ll try.The working class has history on its side, and a choice to make: of following the capitalist death march towards devastation, or joining the Progressive Labor Party, building a revolutionary movement for communism and smashing this capitalist system once and for all.